Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome has raised the level of consciousness of patients with regard to the infectious disease control procedures of health care professionals. The epidemic has also heightened the awareness of health care professionals who might have otherwise felt insulated. This heightened awareness has brought with it the realization that both procedure and apparatus for dealing with potentially infected material must be improved and simplified. Every effort must be made to encourage the use of techniques and devices which will ensure the safety of both the patients and the health care provider.
Nowhere is the need for improvement greater than in the handling, storage, and processing of medical tools and probes. Dental tools are an excellent example. Dentists use a plurality of sharp ended picks and probes on almost every patient they examine. As soon as these probes are placed into the mouth of a patient, they are contaminated. Thus these tools may be the source of further transmission of, for example, the AIDS virus, hepatitis, or some form of bacterial infection.
Similarly, in handling the various dental tools, it is not uncommon for dental assistants, hygienists and dentists to stick themselves, thereby placing the tools in contact with potentially contaminated blood or placing the health care professional at risk of potential contamination from the patient.
A container which would allow for easy access to tools and which would minimize inadvertent contact with sharp and contaminated portions of the tools would, understandably, be of great use. A number of autoclavable, sterilizable dental trays and dental or medical setups are known. These include those disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos: 846,030; 3,285,409; 857,240; 4,762,688; 4,774,063; 4,772,418; 4,798,292; and 4,865,821. These trays suffer from various shortcomings. Some, such as that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,865,821, do not include a cover element and, therefore, offer no consistent protection against inadvertently coming in contact with contaminated tools retained on the tray. Others, such as the trays described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,959,199 and 4,643,303, do include covers. However, these trays are generally too big to fit into such devices as particle cleaners Particle cleaners are traditionally employed to remove particles from tools before they are sterilized. As such, the tools will have to be manually placed into the particle cleaner, thus requiring undesirable and unwanted manipulation of a potentially contaminated tool. Furthermore, these trays are generally large and hold many tools. As such, it will be necessary to wait and collect a sufficient number of tools, used in treating a plurality of patients, before the tray can be used to maximum efficiency. In the interim, it is possible for a health care professional to inadvertently select an already contaminated tool or inadvertently come in contact with a contaminated tool when reaching for an uncontaminated tool on the same tray. Finally, these trays are generally too large to be used in smaller office style autoclaves. This necessitates the expenditure of capital to buy new equipment before the useful life of the old equipment has run.
Although unrelated to sterilization trays or cassettes used in the medical and dental communities, tools such as mechanics, tools are often sold in a rolled-up plastic holder which is fastened by a rope or a snap. These containers usually include a flat piece of plastic having laminated thereto a second piece of plastic. The first and the second pieces of plastic form a plurality of pockets into which each tool is slid such that it may be retained when the device is rolled up. U.S. Pat. No. 230,772 features a device of similar construction for holding pencils.
Obviously, the need for a contaminated tool holder which is small enough to retain the tools commonly necessary for the treatment of a single patient and which is of a size and shape which can readily and easily fit directly into, for example, a particle cleaner or a small autoclave, is great. Furthermore, the need for a device which can protect those persons coming in contact therewith from exposure to contaminated tools while, at the same time, protecting the tools from contamination after sterilization has been effectuated is also great. The present invention meets these needs as well as others as will be apparent from this discussion.